AUTHOR ARCHIVES

Diane Barnes

Diane Barnes is a reporter with Global Security Newswire, having first joined the publication as a staff writer in 2007. She covers daily developments on Syria's chemical weapons, Iran's nuclear program, strategic arms control and other issues. Barnes has contributed to publications including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Palm Beach Post and the London Daily Telegraph. She is a graduate of George Washington University.

July 9, 2014
Syria's regime may be able to retain parts of its shuttered chemical-arms factories under "compromise" terms devised by a global watchdog agency. The United States could endorse the concept in order to finalize a plan this week for dealing with the dozen contested sites, even though doing so would require...

June 27, 2014
Congress will weigh this year whether to continue spending billions of dollars on antidotes for attacks seen as relatively unlikely, but potentially devastating. Lawmakers helped to establish Project Bioshield in 2004 to incentivize otherwise unprofitable work on treatments for exotic possible terrorism tools, such as anthrax and botulinum toxin. In...

June 25, 2014
A team of professors near New York City wants to make terrorism a larger focus for medical-school students across the United States. A plan now taking shape would insert discussions of terror threats -- such as a biochemistry-course lecture on nerve agents -- throughout the four-year curriculum at Rutgers New...

June 24, 2014
A team of professors near New York City wants to make terrorism a larger focus for medical-school students across the United States. A plan now taking shape would insert discussions of terror threats -- such as a biochemistry-course lecture on nerve agents -- throughout the four-year curriculum at Rutgers New...

June 23, 2014
A top investigator said Syria has surrendered the final chemical arms it admitted to holding, but any secret arsenal may allow gas attacks to continue. "The last of the remaining chemicals identified for removal from Syria were loaded this afternoon aboard the Danish ship Ark Futura," said Ahmet Üzümcü, director-general...

June 5, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
Homeland Security officials said they are moving to tighten overseas checks of U.S.-bound cargo containers deemed likely to be hiding nuclear contraband. Federal authorities hope foreign seaports will eventually scan all cargo they consider at "high risk" of containing weapon-usable nuclear or radiological materials, according to Wednesday testimony by Kevin...

May 26, 2014
Iran is moving to eliminate more of the uranium it could most easily refine into nuclear-bomb material, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Friday. Inspectors last week confirmed that Iran had fed nearly 670 pounds of its 20 percent-enriched uranium-hexafluoride gas into a system at its Isfahan facility for producing...

May 19, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
Auditors say the Defense Department is not following its own procedures for guarding against "potentially catastrophic" biological strikes. Pentagon rules require the agency each year to revisit its list of top biological-weapon threats, with an eye to possibly reshuffling the order of agents deemed most dangerous to its military personnel...

April 29, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
A senior U.S. public-health official has taken a stand against his department's latest push to cut federal funds to an array of medical-readiness initiatives. More than half a decade of reductions to spending on state and local public-health agencies has already been "extremely damaging" to capabilities across the country for...

Database-level encryption had its origins in the 1990s and early 2000s in response to very basic risks which largely revolved around the theft of servers, backup tapes and other physical-layer assets. As noted in Verizon’s 2014, Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR)1, threats today are far more advanced and dangerous.

In order to better understand the current state of external and internal-facing agency workplace applications, Government Business Council (GBC) and Riverbed undertook an in-depth research study of federal employees. Overall, survey findings indicate that federal IT applications still face a gamut of challenges with regard to quality, reliability, and performance management.

PIV- I And Multifactor Authentication: The Best Defense for Federal Government Contractors

This white paper explores NIST SP 800-171 and why compliance is critical to federal government contractors, especially those that work with the Department of Defense, as well as how leveraging PIV-I credentialing with multifactor authentication can be used as a defense against cyberattacks

This research study aims to understand how state and local leaders regard their agency’s innovation efforts and what they are doing to overcome the challenges they face in successfully implementing these efforts.

The U.S. healthcare industry is rapidly moving away from traditional fee-for-service models and towards value-based purchasing that reimburses physicians for quality of care in place of frequency of care.